EVERY MONDAY

travel industry when they leave school.

There’s a lack of joined-up thinking from schools and parents, obviously. For example, if my daughter said she wanted to work in the hotel business, I think I would have to find a way of forcing her to study Spanish. Thanks to her pleasingly proactive primary school, she does know the word for “pencil sharpener”, but that’s not going to get her very far. If we don’t take the entry requirements for certain careers more seriously, we do our children a huge disservice.

There is absolutely no point in allowing a youngster to progress through school with a certain outcome in mind without equipping them for every stage of the journey.

However, the Government must play a part in this. It has not been compulsory for GCSE pupils to study a foreign language since 2004. Consequently, the number of exam candidates has been steadily dropping. The British Council says that in 2015,

Far from being a niche subject, languages should be at the heart of the curriculum.

the number of French exams fell by 6.2 per cent compared with the previous year, German by almost 10 per cent and Spanish by 2.4 per cent. At A-level, only Spanish is seeing an upwards trajectory, with a rise of 14 per cent in exam candidates.

That dreaded “exam” is regularly identified as the main deterrent. Far be it from me to suggest further reform in schools, but surely ministers might be able to come up with some solutions?

Action must be taken before it’s too late. In countless schools provision is becoming limited or even curtailed. What chance then will young people have to compete on the multibillion pound global platform Heathrow’s research highlights?

Far from being a niche subject, languages should be at the heart of the curriculum. They should be incorporated into learning from the foundation years upwards. I urge a serious re-think at the Department for Education because it comes to something when we have to rely on an airport to teach our children how to ask for an ice cream in Mandarin.